Godot worth its wait

Jenny Blain

Posted: Monday, 28 June 2010 at 12:00pm

Captivating and playful, yes, but whoever thought that Waiting For Godot could be hilarious, writes ABC Arts blogger Jenny Blain.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot comes saddled with a fearsome reputation. Even in the most talented of hands its bleak and enigmatic drollery is forever at risk of slippage into obscurity and tedium. Nevertheless I can safely say that the Theatre Royal Haymarket’s Godot, under the direction of Sean Mathias, transcends all such dangers and does so in spades. Captivating and playful, yes, but whoever thought that Godot could be hilarious? In keeping with the spirit of the thing, it not only provoked a gorblimey! but knocked my socks off.

Chief among the delights is the unabashed relish that Ian McKellen brings to the role of Estragon – despite the hundreds of times he has played it of late one suspects that each time it is freshly enjoyed. His character is authentically and pathetically decrepit (so much so that when resting on a bench during rehearsals in Melbourne he was mistaken for the real thing and thrown a dollar), a has-been who treads a fine line between stoicism and an irrepressible life-force (that is, when he’s not nodding off). McKellen’s fellow wayfarer and foil, Roger Rees as the well-spoken Vladimir, is no less distinguished: these two have a history of stage performances together and a demonstrable rapport. Even their accusatory banter and name-calling – sewer-rat, curate, cretin, critic (ouch!) – comes protectively insulated with affection, though it has to be said that Estragon is not above having fun at Vladimir’s expense by mimicking his toffee accents, gestures and mannerisms. McKellen has written that Roger’s character ‘is the provider, the guardian, the one who is trying to work out the plan’ and it is plain that when Estragon is through with mischief-making – and feeling melancholy – it is to Vladimir that he turns for refuge.

Waiting for Godot has been notoriously described as a play where nothing happens, twice – an appealing witticism but one with little substance. While Beckett’s absurdist concoction may be purposefully devoid of linear progression in terms of action or resolution, it is nevertheless packed with suggestion, reference, allusion and mystery. The vastly entertaining camaraderie of games playing, joke-telling, bickering, singing and hat swapping is show-biz gloss intersected by a serious play of ideas where religion jostles with the pragmatics of philosophy and the contemplation of suicide. There is talk of repentance in the context of how only one of the four Evangelists claims that a thief was saved at the Crucifixion (a comment on the unreliability of the written word?). Is there a theme of salvation here? Certainly there are times when Vladimir and Estragon, believing in the imminent arrival of Godot, cry out ‘We’re saved!’

Eventually there is a ‘happening’ in Beckett’s play – one which causes the pair to wonder whether their waiting is over – and that is the eruption of Pozzo (Matthew Kelly) on to the stage – a giant of a man dressed in houndstooth and leather resembling a swollen Lord Kitchener – trailing his heavily laden and tethered slave Lucky (Brendan O’Hea). Pozzo is domineering, condescending, an imperialist force cum middle-class landowner who throws crumbs (a chicken bone) to his minions and who takes a cruel pleasure in commanding the downtrodden and spectral Lucky to dance and think (he thinks out loud in a barely comprehensible outpouring of gibberish, but only as long as his hat stays on). There is a shift in the balance of power when they return in Act 2. Now Pozzo is blind, shrunken and infirm, beholden to an ungrudging Lucky to take care of his needs. Is this meant as a kindly political statement about the working classes? Or again, is it about the inexplicable ties that bind us?

On a purely physical plane, the Haymarket production has added texture and complexity to Beckett’s concept by taking the characters off the road and into the theatre, a subtle transition from journey to waiting room. The Theatre here – shabby and strewn as it is with remnants of classical pediments, bordered by Shakespearean balconies and backed by a forbidding Barbican-like brick wall – defies Beckett’s insistence on ‘a road and a tree’ by introducing a discourse on the nature of theatricality itself. The tree, ambiguous symbol of death and crucifixion, of new life and hope, now grows valiantly through the boards to sprout its mandatory three leaves on cue. Beside the tree is surely another symbol, a large hole as yawning chasm. From the rubble behind this hole the small urchin/angel makes periodic appearances to give updates on the arrival of Godot.

Vladimir and Estragon are as mystified as everyone else as to the nature of Godot. For these two old ex-music hall codgers whose only pastime is hanging around in the theatre he could be either their saviour, their casting agent, or both. They keep believing against all probability that he will arrive; the only alternative seems to be suicide and their attempts at that are clumsily half-hearted. In interviews Ian McKellen has explained that it’s human nature (especially when you’re old) to be always waiting for something, whether it’s waiting to win the lottery, waiting to fall in love, waiting for Christmas, the paycheck or a bit of hope in our lives.

When pressed, Beckett said of his play: ‘it’s all about symbiosis’, leading Cameron Woodhead to conclude that he is admitting Godot is fundamentally a love story. In Mathias’s hands the final vaudevillian exit of the bowler-hatted Estragon and Vladimir to the tune of Underneath the Arches is jauntily eloquent of not only fortitude and resilience but of a deeply shared tenderness.

We may have to wait interminably to see another Godot as satisfying as this.